ORONO – Ginger Yang Hwalek, a music instructor in the University of Maine School of Performing Arts’ music division and longtime piano teacher and accompanist in the Bangor area, has been named the 2006 Teacher of the Year by one of the largest music teachers organizations in the nation.

The award from the Music Teachers National Association is granted to a person who has gone beyond the call of duty to exemplify excellence in music teaching. Criteria include maintaining a successful music studio, upholding high professional standards by being an MTNA Nationally Certified Teacher of Music and involvement in the MTNA at state, division and national levels.

The association is a professional organization with 24,000 members who teach in homes, professional studios, conservatories, colleges and universities. Although the membership is primarily piano teachers, the MTNA also attracts strings, brass, woodwinds and voice teachers.

Hwalek said she was unaware she’d been nominated for the MTNA award.

“I was in shock,” she said. “Never in a million years would I have imagined it. To me, this is like the Oscar for piano teaching. This is very special because it’s my peers” who made the selection.

The Bangor resident will receive the award on March 29 at the association’s national conference in Austin, Texas. UM faculty and friends celebrated with Hwalek at a public reception on Feb. 24.

Hwalek serves as the MTNA National Senior Competition coordinator. She has held a number of offices within the association since 1982, including association president and board member. She also was the association’s Eastern Division president from 1998 to 2000.

Locally and regionally, Hwalek has been site coordinator and adjudicator for student evaluations for many years in Orono, elsewhere in Maine, and in New Hampshire and Rochester, N.Y. She has organized and conducted at several piano “monster concerts” in New Hampshire and Vermont, has taught in Michigan and has been music director for the MacPherson (Kansas) Symphony Orchestra and the Central Maine String Orchestra.

Hwalek, who was raised in South Bend, Ind., has taught private piano lessons and held studio recitals in the Bangor area since moving to Maine in 1982. Her students have been selected to participate in prestigious chamber music programs in Blue Hill, Rockport and Portland and have won the Arcady Music Society’s Student Competition 11 times. Hwalek was the Arcady Music Society’s Teacher of the Year Award winner in 1993.

At the university, Hwalek has taught piano classes, music history, tonal counterpoint and analytical orchestration. She took over the chamber music program in 1999 and currently directs UM’s Maine Summer Youth Music program.

Hwalek has been a professional accompanist in the Bangor area and routinely accompanies student and faculty recitals on and off campus. She regularly collaborates with professor and soprano Nancy Ellen Ogle of the music division faculty, with whom she has performed and recorded three CDs of contemporary American art songs under the Capstone Records label.

In spite of a busy professional schedule, Hwalek has supported her 16-year-old son’s soccer team as a team parent and helps coordinate their snack shack. She and her husband, John Hwalek, an associate professor of chemical engineering, have hosted American Field Service foreign exchange students from Greenland, Hong Kong, Thailand and Italy. The Hwaleks also have an 18-year-old daughter.

Hwalek said she immerses herself in teaching in so many venues because she is enthusiastic about seeing people improve their piano skills and music appreciation.

“I love students at any level,” she says. “I guess I love people. I think that altruism is what drives me.”

Stuart Marrs, chairman of the music division of the School of Performing Arts, congratulated Hwalek. “We feel proud and honored to have within our ranks a faculty member who has received this prestigious national award,” he said.